Selling your services is hard. Especially for those who are more introverted than extroverted. (oh hey, that’s me.) My first year of business, I did everything I could to avoid sales calls. Instead, I opted for a simple exchange about deliverables through email.
As I’m sure you can imagine, I wasn’t charging very much back then.
The thing is, you can’t expect to sell your services at a high price point if you can’t articulate the value.
You can’t hide behind your brand either. You can have the greatest brand since sliced bread, but if you can’t sell—if you can’t articulate why someone should hire you—you’re in trouble.
I can tell you from personal experience that learning how to sell your services takes courage and practice. It’s a skill that’s honed over time.
But if you’re looking for a way to bypass the awkward learning curve, I’m here to tell you that a brand strategy lends a huge advantage to improving your sales calls. It gives you exactly what you need to articulate the value around what you do and have the conversation flow with confidence, purpose and sincerity so that that person feels trusting, safe, and GOOD about hiring you.
Let me break it down for you!
CONTENTS
THE CONNECTION BETWEEN BRAND STRATEGY AND SELLING YOUR SERVICES
Brand strategy is about zeroing in on your unique value as a business. Your value, of course, will ultimately be decided by your potential clients. They want to know if the solution you have is valuable enough to pay for. What they deem valuable may be different than what you know to be valuable.
So in approaching your brand strategy, there’s one primary goal: to find the magic middle between the problem your audience has and the solution you offer. We’re striving for clarity around your mission and developing language that highlights how your mission directly benefits your ideal client.
When it comes to selling your services, your brand strategy allows us to develop the narrative around what you do. Because people remember stories—and your narrative needs:
a beginning (the problem your audience has)
a middle (your solution), and
an end (the transformation)
WHO ARE YOU SELLING YOUR SERVICES TO?
Good luck trying to sell a solution to an unknown problem. There’s a quote from Seth Godin that brilliantly captures this:
"It doesn’t make any sense to make a key and then run around look for a lock to open. The only productive solution is to find a lock and then fashion a key."
Before you can sell, you need to understand the problem your audience has—in a very nuanced way.
In developing your brand strategy, this is where we start: gaining a deep understanding of who you’re in business to serve. It’s about finding those key problem areas and looking at the ripple effect it has in their life.
where are they aspiring to go?
what’s stopping them from getting there?
what’s possible for them?
Not only does this allow you to better shape your services, but it allows you to speak to them in a way that directly connects with their deep rooted desires. When it’s obvious how much you understand the problem they have, they’ll feel seen and heard.
SELLING YOUR SERVICES AUTHENTICALLY BUT STRATEGICALLY
If you want to know how to sell your services without sounding salesy, your brand strategy will guide the way. Here’s how.
Once we know who your ideal client is (we want to know them like we do our BFF), it’s time for a bit of self-reflection. We’ll spend time reflecting on:
your mission
the impact you’re trying to make
why you do what you do, and
where you want to go as a business
All the while, we’re keeping your ideal client in mind. We’re looking for the overlap and the emotional impact. We’re connecting the dots between you and them. We’re looking for the right language to use that will allow you to sell your services in a way that will resonate with them but also feel natural to you.
THE IMPACT BRAND MESSAGING HAS ON YOUR SALES CALLS
Remember those dots we were connecting above? Those dots are where you and your ideal client connect and share some overlap. During the brand strategy development, we make note of those dots and turn them into relevant talking points. These make up your brand messaging.
Your brand messaging is made up of all the things you want others to associate with your business. These can be things like:
what you do and how
the problem your audience has (functional, emotional, self-expressive) and the direct solution you have to offer
your origin story and how it relates to your audience’s own journey
your shared values
Your brand messaging will also be broken down into content pillars, forming your business’s content strategy. This allows you to further articulate your value in your marketing efforts.
THE SELLING YOUR SERVICES UNOFFICIAL SCRIPT
So now you get a sense for how we develop your brand strategy, but maybe it all still feels abstract. I want you to think of your brand strategy guide like an unofficial script for selling your services. Inside, we’ve distilled the verbiage and phrasing down to be memorable and impactful. Here are just some of the key elements you’ll find inside your brand strategy that will help you with selling your services online or on a sales call:
1. MISSION STATEMENT
Your mission statement clearly communicates what you’re aiming to do as a business, for whom, and to what end. Your mission statement will evolve with your business but serves to guide your business and keep it focused on a particular impact for your audience.
2. AUDIENCE PERSONA
Your audience persona is a nuanced look at one or more unique personas that represents your ideal client. It details both demographic and psychographic characteristics in a way that brings to life real individual(s) you are trying to reach through your brand. Your audience persona should be regularly referred to as you craft offers, sell your services, and market your business.
3. VALUE PROPOSITION
Also known as your brand promise, your value proposition is a short and sweet and clearly communicates what you offer, to whom, and the emotional benefit it brings them. The verbiage used in crafting your value proposition is designed to be memorable and a great asset for selling your services both on a sales call, in your marketing, and on your website.
4. KEY BENEFITS
A list of clearly defined key benefits that go beyond the obvious benefit your business offers. This triad of benefits identifies the functional, emotional and self-expressive benefits of your business to use to really connect with the needs and desires of our target audience.
5. PROBLEM + SOLUTION
Selling professional services like yours gets a whole lot easier when you’ve identified your ideal client’s problems and countered with each one with a specific solution. Your brand strategy will identify specific problem-solution scenarios that your messaging and offers will emerge from. With this in your back pocket, you’ll always know how to address their challenges. They’ll quickly realize how qualified you are to solve their problems.
6. EMOTIONAL IMPACT
Your strategy will touch on your brand’s emotional impact. This showcases how your unique story can serve as a bridge to connect with your ideal clients. Branding is all about emotion, relatability, and bringing a human element to your business. When it comes to your brand story, brand messaging, you want to speak to those emotions as often as possible because it’s our emotions that inspire us to take action.
7. BRAND POSITIONING
Brand positioning is the distinct space you hold in the mind of your target audience. It summarizes what you do, for whom, and how you’re different from the competition. Your brand positioning statement is crafted in such a way that you’ll always know how to pitch why your business is uniquely qualified to solve their problem.
8. CONTENT PILLARS
Your content pillars are the overarching themes for your content marketing and social channels equipped with a list of topics for each content pillar. These will help you shape your brand’s reputation, build familiarity and trust around what you do and get your ideal clients to book a sales call.
We use everything we know about who your ideal client is—their behaviours, desires, challenges—and use that to shape your brand strategy parallel to your own mission and impact. So when the time comes to be selling your services to a potential client, these brand phrases, statements, and themes act like a script. They’re strategically focused around the needs of your client. They directly speak to the problem they have and the solution you’re able to provide. It allows you to clearly articulate the value of your services and the transformation that’s possible for them.
From your content marketing to your sales calls, the more your brand messaging infiltrates their psyche, the more they pay attention, grow familiar, and start to see this value as the best option for them—as the thing you’re most qualified to do.
Whether you have a brand identity or not, developing a brand strategy for your business will give you the foundation you need to sell better, serve better, and grow faster!
Apply now to see how brand strategy can guide your business forward.
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Jenny Henderson Studio is a branding studio that increases memorability, connection and performance for service-based solopreneurs using strategic simplification and design.